“Babe, I’m sorry, but could you try to call my phone?” Danny asks with a sigh. “I think I might have left it on the plane.”
“You think it was in your pocket? I don’t remember seeing it.” I reach into my purse, checking all the usual pockets before I start shaking my head and allow my sifting to become more frantic, hoping my acting is good enough to pull this off.
“Shit,” I say after a minute. “I think mine is gone, too.”
“You’re kidding.” Danny runs a hand over the top of his now-smooth ponytail as he glances around us. “Do you think someone stole them?”
“I don’t know how.” I continue to move the crap in my purse around for a few moments before I abandon my efforts with a frustrated huff. “But it’s definitely not in here.”
I shake my head again, meeting Danny’s mystified look with one of my own, ignoring the guilt niggling at the back of my brain. “How could this have happened? I didn’t even set my purse down when I went to the bathroom. It’s been right next to me since we got off the plane.”
Danny curses, “I don’t know, but I’m going to have to hit a payphone as soon as we get through customs and let Caitlin and Gabe know my phone got snatched. Caitlin is supposed to have the baby any day, and I told Gabe to call as soon as they headed to the hospital.”
“Maybe we can get one of those pay as you go phones,” I say. “Just to use for however long we decide to stay. That way we won’t miss the baby news.”
“That’ll probably work,” Danny says. “But we need to call and report our phones stolen, too. I have no idea what kind of information I have saved on mine. All my banking stuff for the business is on there and the login pages for the scheduling portal…”
He pulls in a deep breath. “I am seriously screwed if I have any passwords saved, and I only have a handful of phone numbers memorized. I’m going to have to call Pete and have him pull my client contacts from the computer at the office.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, meaning it.
I hate that I’m causing Danny stress, no matter how necessary it was to ditch our phones.
“It’s not your fault.” He wraps an arm around my shoulders. “And hey, at least we still have our passports and our wallets. Could have been much worse.”
His choice of words makes me smile as I lean into him. “You’re right. It could have been.”
Things could have been so much worse, but they aren’t.
I made it out of the country before the shit hit the fan and have eliminated the first threat to our new beginning. I’m not stupid or naïve enough to believe everything will be clear sailing from here on out, but so far it seems like the fates are with me.
Or at least not totally against me, and for now that’s good enough.
Chapter Six
Danny
Three Years Earlier
“There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and the music in its roar.”
-Lord Byron
* * *
Some days the ocean is the best friend you’ll ever have. Some days, the ocean is out for your blood, and you never know what kind of day it’s going to be until it’s too late to make a damn bit of difference.
No matter how good a swimmer you are, how savvy you get at reading the waves, or how careful you try to be, the ocean is better, savvier, hungrier. Mother Ocean will give you joy, hope, and comfort, but she will also drag you low, strip you bare, and make all your nightmares real.
The ocean is where all the oldest nightmares were born, and where they still live, washing in and out on the tide, waiting for humans to drop their guard and step into the water…
* * *
I learned about the ocean’s dark side my first year on the island, when I got smacked in the head by a surfboard, got so dizzy I didn’t know which way was up, and nearly drowned. If Sam hadn’t been there to tow me to shore, I might not have lived to see my fourteenth birthday.
The violence of the ocean shouldn’t take me by surprise, but when I look up from the book I’m reading—a mystery about aliens taking over the earth I wouldn’t have touched if Sam hadn’t put it in my hands but that now I can’t get enough of—to see Sam struggling against the current a few hundred feet from shore, I can’t believe she’s really in trouble.
But she’s the strongest swimmer I know, flits through my head even though I know that doesn’t mean anything.
The ocean doesn’t care if you’re Hercules with a side of Thor. If the ocean’s decided to fight you, the best you can hope for is to live long enough for it to lose interest.
I know this, but still I sit on my ass for a good thirty seconds after I see her, some stupid part of my brain refusing to process that Sam is fighting like hell to get back to the beach in between sets of punishing waves that toss her farther out to sea every time they roll her under. By the time I throw my book to the towel and surge to my feet, she’s already ten feet farther out.
By the time I race like hell for the ocean, snatching some kid’s abandoned boogie board off the sand as I run, Sam is getting slammed by a shoulder high wave so hard that when she goes under she doesn’t come up again for a long, long time.
I hit the water at a sprint, muscles burning as I fight my way past the shore break, heart lodging in my throat until I see her dark head surface in the trough, her shoulders heaving as she pulls in a breath.
“I’m coming, Sam!” I scream as I shove out into the deep water, using the boogie board like a kick board and kicking like crazy toward her, hoping the board will be enough to keep us both afloat until we can get out of the rip tide.
I scream her name again, but I’m not sure she can hear me over the roar of the surf and I need all the oxygen in my lungs to keep kicking like hell as I duck under waves that are curling hard overhead, clawed fingers determined to scratch through skin and draw blood. It’s a brutal swim, but I make good time and I’m almost close enough to touch her when a double wave catches the front of my board and flips me hard.
If I’d taken the time to leash the board to my wrist, I would have been able to let go and use my arms to fight free of the roll, but I didn’t. If I let go of the board now, I’m never going to get my hands on it again, and Sam and I might both die because of it. I’m a strong swimmer, but not as strong as she is, and definitely not strong enough to tow her to shore without something to help me stay afloat.
I tighten my grip on the boogie board and concentrate on holding my breath while I’m spun like a top and punched down toward the bottom of the ocean. Finally, after seconds that stretch on forever, with nothing but the darkness behind my eyes and the muted rumble of the water frothing above my head to keep me company, the wave decides it’s done with me and spits me back up toward the light.
The second I break the surface, I suck in air and shake the hair from my eyes, blinking as I scan the water around me, trying to orient myself and figure out how far I am from Sam.